passenger on board one of the steamers of the Messagéries Impériales to Marseilles from the East, at the close of the Crimean War. There was an immense crowd of officers and soldiers on board, and the weather was very hot, but the only bath-room was closed, and it was from a conclusive answer to the demands for admission which were made to the persecuted steward that we learned the reason why--"the bath was occupied." It contained the body of an officer which had been embalmed, and which was being taken to France for burial in some martial cemetery! Washington Irving wrote long ago that "the sea is all monotony," though he claimed leave to correct the expression, and if it were a monotony of fair winds and smooth water, and eighteen miles an hour, it would be very tolerable indeed. But surely there is no monotony in a sea voyage in an Atlantic liner! Look at the different phases of character exhibited on board day after day! Observe the ups and downs of its life; watch the microcosm of the crowded deck, where every chair holds its little Areopagus and pronounces judgment on the world around it. There were brave men among us who resorted to ignoble artifices, and went by devious ways to their cabins to escape the masked batteries, and the spectacles and glasses _en barbette_ of the long lines of cushioned bastions where the enemy were lying in vigilant scrutiny of every movement. And then the Babel of tongues at times--the variety of topics one hears discussed. Hark to that trumpet tone! It is not Jeremiah warning the nations to flee from the wrath to come! No! it is merely a gallant officer of a scientific corps who is expounding to some admiring Americans a few articles of his faith, and proving that Mr. Gladstone is the "Man of Sin" specially intended for the destruction of the British army and Empire. And there, in a cozy nook by the wheel-house, an earnest Democrat is holding forth to his English auditors on the evils of democracy as illustrated by the conduct of the Republicans in the exercise of political power, the manipulation of ballot-boxes and public bullion; and a sturdy Briton near at hand is enlarging on the absolute necessity of restoring the worn-out lands of the Eastern States and Canada to fertility by the use of manures of which he is the manufacturer. Among the Americans there were not wanting signs and tokens that the traditions of a great war and the influence of party politics were as powerful as social distinctions, and their cliques were as marked as if each represented a different "set" in one of the old countries.